Reading science fiction like it matters since 1989.

New York City ... the splendor, picturesqueness, and oceanic amplitude and rush of these great cities ... costly and lofty new buildings ... the tumultuous streets, Broadway, the heavy, low, musical roar, hardly ever intermitted, even at night ... the assemblages of the citizens in their groups, conversations, trades, evening amusements ... these, I say, and the like of these, completely satisfy my senses of power, fulness, motion.

—Walt Whitman (1819–1892)

Introduction

In a previous paper, I outlined the events that have led to the current pandemic (Grech “Pandemics”). This essay briefly describes the propensity of science fiction authors to unleash disasters on New York City and then goes on to outline events currently unfolding in the United States in relation to COVID-19, with particular emphasis on New York City.

03/31/2020

Everybody knows that pestilences have a way of recurring in the world; yet somehow we find it hard to believe in ones that crash down on our heads from a blue sky.

—Albert Camus, The Plague, 1948.

COVID-19 is currently a global pandemic. A pandemic is a disease outbreak that is prevalent over a wide area, from a group of countries to the entire world. The current pandemic disease, COVID-19, is caused by a novel coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2. The global spread is following an approximately exponential curve: it took 67 days to reach the first 100,000 cases; 11 more days to reach 200,000; and just 4 more to reach 300,000 cases. This virus’s deadliness lies in its stealth, spreading silently with an incubation period of weeks. It kills slowly, weeks after infection (Chen et al., Ferguson et al.).

We are all hugely blessed to have had Ursula K. Le Guin with us for so long. Her work and example deserve to linger long in our cultural memory, and will, should that memory itself long continue. My biggest worry is that it won’t. Ensuring that it can and will, and in good health, is, in my view, the very work that she greatly advanced and that we all must carry on—a work that must never end, as once ended it is unlikely ever to begin again, here on Earth or anywhere in its immediate vicinity.

06/15/2019

In a previous article in this series (“Tales of the Fays: The Comtesse De Murat and the Origins of Fantasy,” NYRSF #347), I offered a brief sketch of the work done in the genre of contes de fées [defined there for operational purposes as “tales of fays”] by the Comtesse de Murat, claiming that it was the most influential work done in the genre by any of its five originators in terms of its influence on subsequent writers who attempted to carry it further, even though it was never as popular with other readers as the work of Baronne d’Aulnoy.

The myths we tell ourselves and each other about our favorite authors are, as a rule, misleading at best. It is a near-universal belief that Philip K. Dick was half-mad and possibly a high-functioning psychotic. Yet editors who worked with the man have told me that he was unfailingly rational. Similarly, it is commonly agreed that R.A. Lafferty was unlike any other writer, and this is pretty much true. But the truth can be exaggerated. He was not the solitary, literarily isolated genius, completely untouched by the work of others, that we have been making him out to be in the years since his death.

This issue began when Michael Swanwick e-mailed me “From A to Z with Gardner Dozios” with the comment “I presume you’ll also be putting together a Gardner-themed issue sometime soon ...”, and in that moment I knew we were. Michael was an enormous help with brainstorming and contacting contributors and this issue owes him an immeasurable debt.

I did not know Gardner nearly as well as I would have liked. I met him at conventions, mostly Worldcons, mostly in passing because he was generally being pulled in a dozen different directions at once. Even under those circumstances, his unmistakable intelligence, charm, and humor came through.

(1) When I was starting out, I used to ask Gardner a lot of questions about his editorial work at Asimov’s. Gardner did not alter the ending of Howard Waldrop’s “Do Ya, Do Ya, Wanna Dance?” He did cut a portion out of Judith Moffett’s “The Hob.” He said it didn’t advance the story.

(2) Gardner delighted in gossip about other editors. He particularly liked telling stories about Roger Elwood, like the Lunacon where Roger held a panel in which he asked trivia questions about movies and whenever anyone got a correct answer, he’d throw a Ring Ding or a Snowball or a Twinkie their way. Gardner said that Roger’s way of assembling an anthology was that he had a long table with stacks of stories on it—one stack was Effinger stories, another stack was Lafferty stories, et cetera. And when the time came to assemble an anthology, he’d simply walk around the table and take one manuscript off each stack.

09/22/2018

“The Adaptive Ultimate,” a short story by Stanley G. Weinbaum, was first published in the November 1935 issue of AstoundingStories. A young biochemist, Dan Scott, researching fruit-fly adaptability, believes he has discovered a sort of cure-all serum. Itching to try it on a human subject, he pleads his case to the esteemed surgeon Dr. Herman Bach of Grand Mercy Hospital. Bach finds Scott a charity case, a woman named Kyra Zelas, who is mere hours from dying of tuberculosis. Injected with Scott’s adaptability serum, Zelas is cured. But that’s not all. The skinny woman from the streets becomes the glamorous title character, the “adaptive ultimate,” the most adaptable human being who ever lived. Her appearance changes, chameleon-like, depending on whether it’s day or night, whether she’s indoors or out; it changes, even, depending on whom she’s talking to, for Zelas aims to please. She’s virtually impervious to poisons or wounds, being so adaptable that she can heal herself immediately. And since one sign of human adaptability is the ability to change one’s environment, Zelas sets out to change her surroundings for maximum evolutionary benefit, stopping short of nothing to get her way. She lies, steals, even murders, and becomes one of the most powerful people in Washington, DC—the consort of a Cabinet secretary, John Callan—enroute to her eventual goal of world domination. Meanwhile, Scott has fallen in love with her, perhaps for the usual reasons and perhaps because Zelas simply has adapted so well to his presence that he can’t help himself. Zelas claims to love him, too, but this might be the adaptability talking. At any rate, Scott can’t bring himself to kill Zelas, however world-threatening she may be. Instead, he and Bach put Zelas to sleep with carbon dioxide gas—since not even a highly adaptable creature, Scott explains, can live off its own waste products—and then Bach operates on her pineal gland to curtail her adaptive powers. The story ends with the operation an apparent success, as the unconscious Zelas, no longer glamorous, now looks as bedraggled as she did when brought to the hospital; to Scott, however, nothing has changed. “‘How beautiful she is!’ he whispered.... To his eyes, colored by love, she was still Kyra the magnificent” (Weinbaum 74).